Commentaries

Authorizing Science Studies: Or, Why We HaveNever Had Paradigms

STEVE FULLER

University of WarwickCoventry CV4 7AL, U.K.

Joan Fujimura (AA 100:347-360, June 1998) has raised a vi-tal set of issues that are not sufficiently highlighted in profes-sional academic forums: who authorizes knowledge claims inour times? She is also right to see the ongoing Science Wars assymptomatic of the unresolved tensions surrounding these is-sues. However, while she and I would probably find ourselveson the same side of most substantive matters in the ScienceWars, I must take serious exception to her framing of the issues,which include how one defines science studies and the legitima-tory uses of the history of science open to science studies practi-tioners.

The nub of my concern turns on what I take to be the most ob-jectionable sentence in her article: "Criticism, then, should bebased on a serious effort to engage with the material on its ownterms rather than on the assumption that the reader and writeremploy the same tools of analysis, description, and repre-sentation" (p. 356). I object to this sentence because it assumesthat the palpable differences in the aims and methods of the vari-ous academic disciplines are inherently worthy of respect andreinforcement. At the level of logic, Fujimura seems to commita version of naturalistic fallacy that often accompanies a rela-tivist sensibility: i.e., sliding from a statement of what is the case(i.e., that there are different disciplines) to a statement of whatought to be the case (that there ought to be different disciplines).In terms of the Science Wars, she simply begs the most impor-tant question that Gross, Levitt, Sokal, and other "science warri-ors" are asking: namely, are a discipline's knowledge claims ac-countable only to other members of that discipline? Clearly, thescience warriors believe the answer is no. Indeed, among themany things that Alan Sokal may have been parodying in theSocial Text hoax is precisely Fujimura's reasoning that, sinceacademic disciplines constitute incommensurable epistemiccommunities, criticism should always be phrased in terms ap-propriate to the target community. Thus, what Sokal could notget science studies people to see by speaking his own language,he would demonstrate by using our language— against us, as itturned out!

To be sure, Sokal and most of his allies typically fail to ac-knowledge that their actions potentially expose their own prac-tices to scrutiny from other disciplines. It would be easy to at-tribute this omission to a lack of reflexive awareness that is oftenassociated with natural scientists. However, I believe that such asmug analysis would be to get science warriors' perspective ex-actly backward. They are silent on the reflexive consequences of

open disciplinary boundaries because they have been alreadyforced to accept them. Here it is worth recalling that while Fu-jimura and other people on "our" side tend to write as if Gross,Levitt, Sokal et al. started the Science Wars, from their stand-point, it is clear that we started it. Accordingly, the first incur-sion came when ethnographers entered the laboratories, boldlydeclaring that it was to their methodological advantage that theywere adept in sociology, anthropology, and philosophy—butnot in the science formally under investigation there.

In retrospect, we may wish to say, in a late Wittgensteinianspirit, that these pioneers of science studies were merely tryingto acquire insights that would be of interest to other sciencestudies specialists but would ultimately leave the practice of sci-ence undisturbed. But the rhetoric of the day was certainly muchmore aggressive, implying that scientists were ignorant of thetrue determinants of their activities because, like most of thepublic, they invested too much ontological import in science'stalk of rationality and objectivity (e.g., Knorr-Cetina 1981; La-tour and Woolgar 1979). Science studies, then, was on a missionto save the integrity of scientific practice from the mystificationsof scientific discourse. Certainly this was why I entered the fieldas a graduate student 15 years ago.

When I read putative defenses of science studies like Fu-jimura's, I often feel that our opponents are better in touch withthe critical impulse that animates our field, which indeed doesaim to demystify disciplinary boundaries. In that respect, I havecome to regard the Science Wars as a matter of receiving a doseof one's own medicine: not exactly welcomed but perhaps salu-tary, in no small part because it opens the space for discussingthe foundational questions of knowledge production that Fu-jimura tried to address in her article. (Would there have beenotherwise a pretext to raise this matter in this journal?) Unfortu-nately, by defending science studies in terms of disciplinary ex-pertise, even "paradigm" (p. 356), she seriously misrepresentsthe persistently heterodox character of this field's research prac-tices—something that is plainly in view at the annual meeting ofthe Society for Social Studies of Science (4S).

"Science studies" is much less an emerging discipline than anideology that colors the conduct of research in an increasingnumber of fields. In this respect, the controversial term con-structivism is more descriptively adequate, and not unreason-ably it has proven to be the real lightning rod of the ScienceWars. Science studies as a discipline with clear standards ofgood and bad research practice, in the manner Fujimura sug-gests, is confined to relatively elite academic institutions, per-haps under local pressure to define their curriculum so as tocomplement already existing degree programs. An apt historicalanalogy here is between, on the one hand, physics and positiv-ism and, on the other, science studies and constructivism.

Constructivism's chief ideological assertion—certainly theone that rattles scientists the most—is that clear normative judg-ments (i.e., what is true versus false, good versus bad) are the

American Anthropologist 101(2):379-384. Copyright© 1999, American Anthropological Association

institutionalized products of decisions that had been genuinelyopen at some point in the past. In other words, what we now be-lieve to be true or good is not the product of the attractive forcesof The True or The Good but the congealed labor of collectivesthat managed not only to win the day but more importantly to:ontrol the means of reproducing the significance of that day forlie benefit of the future. While a constructivist need not be a re-ativist (e.g., I am not one), it is easy to see how that might be the;ase, since constructivism implies that the grounds of legitima-ion are always contingent. From a normative standpoint, thisneans that one is repeatedly faced with the question of whether)ast precedent ought to be carried over into future practice, andf so, how.

There are at least two philosophical sources for this position,rurrents in continental European thought associated withJergson and Husserl contributed a processual view of time,grounded in a phenomenological sense of the asymmetry be-ween the closure of the past and the openness of the future,'rom the Anglo-American world came the later Wittgenstein'sfinitist" musings on the logic of rule-following. Both traditionsave a common ancestor: the intuitionist perspective on the na-lre of mathematical knowledge. Unfortunately, this just so hap-ens to be the position that Fujknura demonizes as "fundamen-ilist" (p. 356) in her attempt to show that science studies wouldave been on the side of the angels in the early debates over the;rmissibility of counterintuitive non-Euclidean geometries. In-;ed, the particular fundamentalist in question, Leopoldronecker, was Husserl's mentor at the University of Berlin,learly something has gone awry, but what exactly?That the bulk of Fujimura's article is devoted to demonstrat-

g her familiarity with the relevant mathematical debates sug-:sts that she feels under unusually heavy scrutiny from the sci-ice warriors, since the analogical conclusions she draws for the:ience Wars turn out to be rather meager and could have beenore easily illustrated with familiar examples in which the sci-tific establishment resisted a new line of inquiry because itallenged taken-for-granted assumptions. However, Fu-lura's analysis of the particular historical case is revealing be-ase of the ease with which she abandons constructivist scru-bs. She disowns not only the constructivist position on thisrticular debate, but also the constructivist historical sensibility>re generally, which would refuse to frame the debate in herher Whiggish terms.The current historic significance attached to geometries thatlate Euclid's Fifth Postulate was constructed in a two-stagecess over a nearly 100-year period starting in the early nine-nth century: the first involved an acceptance that mathemati-objects can exist with no apparent physical instantiation, theond an acceptance that such objects correspond to patternserved in physical reality. While the former stage created theceptual space that enabled the latter, the two stages clearlystitute different grounds for legitimating non-Euclidean ge-ntries (Collins 1998: 697-700,737-739). Fujimurais mainly:erned with the first stage, though the second—in her refer-i to Einstein's use of non-Euclidean geometry in the formu-in of relativity theory (p. 352)—adds rhetorical ballast to heriunt as a kind of long-term vindication. Yet, as I have al-y suggested, it is not clear that Fujimura, as a proper con-;tivist, can avail herself of this Whig history. Rather, sheild have imaginatively transported herself to the early nine-

teenth century when non-Euclidean geometries were first pro-posed and replayed the debates without presupposing (heireventual outcome. This is the tack taken by the most influentialsocial history of science done in a constructivist vein pShapinand Schaffer 1985), and perhaps not surprisingly it concludesthat subsequent developments in the history of science couldhave been other than they were—and might have been better forit.

Unfortunately, Fujimura adopts the much more timid histo-riographical strategy of treating her secondary sources at facevalue and thereby buying into their Whiggism. NotwithstandingKronecker's notorious saying about the divine origin of wholenumbers, mathematical intuitionists generally wanted a scienceof numbers that, in Kantian fashion, corresponds to the limits ofhuman experience. This meant proofs that are executable in a fi-nite number of steps and expressions that offer an abstract char-acterization of nature. Mathematical entities that fail to meetthese criteria were regarded with suspicion. The power of con-structivism in science studies, the source of its demystifyingquality, is precisely this sense of ontological austerity: one's ac-count of science permits only that which is available to the finiteand naive observer; anything more is regarded as a theoreticalconstruction whose probativeness is only as secure as the expe-rience on which it is based. Indeed, I would conjecture that mostpeople who now take a constructivist line in science studieswould have opposed the introduction of non-Euclidean geome-tries into the mathematical canon in the early nineteenth century.Perhaps this speaks poorly for constructivism as a research ide-ology, but that cannot be determined without considering whatalternative histories would have looked like.

Were we to take such counterfactual histories seriously aspart of the process by which accounts of actual history areevaluated, then the constructivist promise of science studies fortransforming our conception of knowledge production wouldstart to be realized. However, as it stands, Fujimura's seeminglytough talk about science studies standing down its opponents isreally a disguised concession. Instead of trying to transform"their" practices, she merely wants them to understand "ours"—and a select subset of those practices, at that. But is science stud-ies so weak that we need reassurance that, say, Bruno Latourwould get an "A+" from a reputable physicist for his grasp ofrelativity theory (p. 359, n. 25), while we ignore pioneers in ourfield (e.g., Barnes 1982; Bloor 1973) whose finitist views on thenature of mathematical knowledge, were they widely accepted,would challenge that discipline's autonomy and may even re-verse the history that Fujimura takes so much for granted?

References Cited

Barnes, Barry1982 T. S. Kuhn and Social Science. New York: Columbia Uni-

versity Press.Bloor, David

1973 Wittgenstein and Mannheim on the Sociology of Mathemat-ics. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science4:173-191.

Collins, Randal]1998 The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellec-

tual Change. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Fujimura, Joan

1998 Authorizing Knowledge in Science and Anthropology.Amercian Anthropologist 100:347-360.

COMMENTARIES / 381

Knorr-Cetina, Karin1981 The Manufacture of Knowledge. Oxford: Pergamon.

Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar1979 Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts.

London: Sage.Shapin, Steve, and Simon Schaffer

1985 Leviathan and the Air Pump. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-versity Press.

Authorizing Science Studies and Anthropology

JOAN H. FUJIMURA

Stanford

My "Authorizing Knowledge in Science and Anthropology"{AA 100:347-360, June 1998) has inspired Steve Fuller to writeabout his concerns. However, his concerns are not the objects ofdiscussion in my article. Indeed, in reading my article, Fuller su-perimposes his concerns over mine. His "objections" to "my"arguments in the article are actually objections to statements Idid not make and positions I do not hold. He has mistakenlyread these problems and concerns onto my article.

In my original paper I discussed questions of knowledge pro-duction in the context of a nineteenth-century scientific war overEuclid's Fifth Postulate and then compared it with current sci-ence wars. My goal was to demonstrate that the weapons—rhe-torical strategies and institutional assaults—used in the currentbattle are not new and have unfortunately been used throughhistory in battles over what gets to be awarded the status of"knowledge" and who gets to be awarded the status of authorityover knowledge production. My hope was that this historicalcomparison and analysis of the rhetorical strategies would helpus to look beyond them to what is at stake: the authority to deter-mine what constitutes knowledge and knowledge production inacademia.

In this effort, I discussed how "anti-science" becomes an ef-fective political weapon wielded against work that goes againstthe accepted knowledge of the day. The article demonstratesthat "anti-science" has been used as such a weapon in battles"within" mathematics, physics, and anthropology, as well as"between" arenas generally designated as "the sciences" and"the humanities."

Undisciplined Science Studies

For Fuller, the science wars are about disciplines, paradigms,and the traffic in-between. He argues that "in terms of the Sci-ence Wars, [Fujimura] simply begs the most important questionthat Gross, Levitt, Sokal, and other 'science warriors' are ask-ing: namely, are a discipline's knowledge claims accountableonly to other members of that discipline?" (Fuller, p. 379). Hisconcern with this issue makes sense within his context, sincequestions about disciplines and paradigms have occupied phi-losophers of science before and especially since Thomas Kuhn'sThe Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962).

My article is in debate with Gross, Levitt, and Sokal (Grossand Levitt 1994; Sokal 1996) who have argued that science-studies authors do not understand science and therefore are notentitled to write about science with any claim to legitimate

authority. Indeed, they have taken the position that only thoseinside the borders of science have such authority, and they dis-dain traffic between. It is this "traffic between" that sets thestage (or battlefield) on which the wars are being fought. I as-sume such traffic and treat it as the source of potential intellec-tual growth and development—not merely or only of attack, po-larization, and dead-end science wars stagnation. But those whofeel themselves attacked become so defensive that they respondwith the political counter-charge of "anti-science" and thus cir-cumnavigate the very debate that would produce an engagedand developing dialogue. For example, Mermin (1999) has ar-gued that instead of opening up the space for discussion, asFuller claims, science warriors are shutting down that spacewith their anti-science epithets.

In contrast to Fuller, I am interested in who is claimingauthority over what, and what are the weapons used by thosewho battle for authority. I chose as my example a mid-nine-teenth-century battle around Euclid's Fifth Postulate and non-Euclidean geometry for two reasons. First, Sokal (1996) hadstated in his hoax article that n was not a constant, and manycommentators have since used it to poke fun at the editors of So-cial Text for their folly at publishing an article that stated that 7t,the perimeter of a unit circle, could be variable. However, as Idiscuss in my article, in non-Euclidean geometry n is not a con-stant. Second, I chose non-Euclidean geometry because it wasthe site of a science war similar to the contemporary science warthat first motivated this article—a battle where both rhetoricaland institutional manipulations have been used to destroy ca-reers and control knowledge production in the academy.

After discussing the case of n in both Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry and the war that surrounded the introduc-tion of non-Euclidean geometry and thereby other possible val-ues for it, I argued that more effort at understanding should be astarting point for criticism.

Ostrogradskii and his students most likely did not understand therevolutionary ideas expressed in Lobachewsky's paper and there-fore could not argue the points presented in the paper. Similarly,Sokal may not understand the writings he criticizes in social and cul-tural studies of science and in cultural studies more generally. Thismisunderstanding may in part be due to his unfamiliarity with thelanguage and context of discussion. Reading, especially across dis-ciplines and across theoretical approaches (sometimes called "para-digms"), is not a transparently facile activity. Understanding thewriting and reading conventions of another author, much less an-other discipline or approach, takes time, effort, and care. As in anyfield, not every writer in social and cultural studies of science is ascareful as s/he should be, and some of the literature may be unclearor "rhetorically excessive." However, the best science studies takethe time, effort, and care to explore the sciences before writing aboutthem. These studies involve patient labor, scholarship, rigor, andcareful argumentation. Language is the major instrument for con-ceptualization and argumentation, thus the best work calibrates lan-guage much as scientists calibrate instruments for measuring thephenomena they attempt to inscribe. Criticism, then, should bebased on aserious effort to engage with the material on its own termsrather than on the assumption that the reader and writer employ thesame tools of analysis, description, and representation. This state-ment applies to both science studies and science studies critics, [p.356]

Perhaps because Fuller is preoccupied with the issue of com-mensurability between disciplines and paradigms, he reads my